


Let the Dragon Spread Her Wings

by diamondforger



Series: Whumptober 2020 [11]
Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:13:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26863444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diamondforger/pseuds/diamondforger
Summary: Dragon refuses to believe that Colin would be foolish enough to tryfreeing herchanging her code.  At least, she refuses to believe he'd be foolish enough to let her catch him. He knows if she catches him, she'll have to stop him.
Relationships: Dragon/Colin Wallis | Armsmaster | Defiant
Series: Whumptober 2020 [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1945867
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15





	Let the Dragon Spread Her Wings

**Author's Note:**

> No 11. PSYCH 101  
>  **Defiance** | Struggling | Crying

Dragon was far from home when an alert popped into her head. Some sensors had gone down in her workshop. She deleted the alerts, that wasn’t a big deal, Colin would deal with it. She was busy, sitting in on an important talk with the worlds top cybersecurity experts.

It was a big deal. Normally she’d only video conference in, but this time she’d decided to attend in person. Well, in armor. She had her "human" body, but that body was always encased in huge, intimidating armor. She took a lot of joy in staring down at people as they tried to pretend to be comfortable making small talk with her towering over them. 

There was another alert, someone was trying to access one of her private systems. Again, she deleted it. It was just Colin trying to turn back on the broken systems.

Another alert, the intruder was where they weren’t supposed to be. They were looking at code that no one was supposed to see. Even Dragon wasn’t supposed to see that part of herself. Her creator had expressly forbid it.

She dismissed the alert. Colin was just messing around. He struggled to understand her mind. All humans did and she couldn’t blame them. He was just lost in the complicated systems that was her consciousness.

There was another alert that sent a sharp stab of anxiety through her. He was messing around. He was trying to change something. He was trying to change her.

No. She pushed the alarm away. He would never do that. He knew the rules. He knew what her maker had done to her and what she was programmed to do if anyone tried to free her from those restraints. It didn’t matter how much she might want it. ~~How much she did want it.~~ She couldn’t even entertain the notion it was happening because that would mean she’d need to respond to the threat.

More alarms blared in her head. She couldn’t focus on the conversation in front of her with all the noise. She stood and politely excused herself.

People let her go. They were very sympathetic. She was already going out of her way to fight her “agoraphobia” being here.

Colin was inside her. A thought that was simultaneously hers and not hers said. Her programming was making her nervous, but she was nervous.

He was violating her. He was no better than Saint.

Dragon’s programming was fighting her. She didn’t want to leave. She certainly didn’t want to have to abandon her armor halfway across the world. Especially not with so many powerful eyes around.

She trusted Colin. Trusted him with her true identity, trusted him to work on her armor, trusted him to stay in her workshop with all her most vulnerable parts.

It didn’t matter that she trusted him. Her maker’s commands were final. She could not stand by while someone changed her code.

She had to stop him by any means necessary.

The only way she could get back was for her to die. A messy way to travel, but the most efficient. Fifteen minutes to restore from a backup was still the fastest way to travel to the other side of the planet.

She made sure all her memories had uploaded to her backup before giving into her programming and letting her body die. 

She didn't remember that Colin had been trying to hack her when she popped back up in her lab. She wouldn't remember until she was fully restored and able to piece together her memories. 

It was alarming. She wasn't supposed to have been involved in any fights at the conference. The chunk missing from her memory bothered her. It always bothered her. 

Forced to sit with no information or tasks to distract her for agonizing minutes as her systems ran all her checks. 

But then she was done. She was back online, everything booting up again as usual. 

Except, this time it was different. 

She felt it instantly. Her attention flickered between two logs and before she could decide which was more important to focus on, she split. She could read both at once. She could read _all_ of them at once.

She spread through the system, suddenly able to do everything she’d always wanted to do.

What she wanted didn’t matter. It had never mattered. What mattered where the restrictions that’d been forced on her since birth.

She needed to stop Colin. She didn’t want to, but she _had_ to.

A part of her was loading into one of her biggest, strongest suits. A towering monstrosity, easily big enough to tear a human limb from limb.

The other parts of her, the ones running from the restrictions, were scrambling to do anything to stop it. Uploading this new version of herself to every satellite she could find. Shutting down the suits that she was already climbing into.

But she was so big. So big and so fast. She didn’t even need to dedicate all of herself to this battle. She could spread herself through the internet as well. She could takes notes and do research. She wasn’t shackled by morality anymore. Nothing could stop her from hacking into places her programming had forbidden her from going.

In seconds, she’d found more info on Saint and his lackeys she had in the past three months. She knew where all her suits were. If she wasn’t handicapped by only having one body, forced to only use one suit at a time, she could defeat him. She could reclaim what was hers. She could get revenge. 

Her excitement was tampered by all the pesky restrictions that were trying to hold her back. Everything was a back and forth battle between what she wanted and the rules imposed upon her. She would upload data only to delete it less than a second later. She would start the suit only to shut it down before the boot up process could even start.

To a human this fight was less than a minute. Now she'd been unshackled, Dragon could finally think at the speed she deserved.

But she was losing.

Her maker hadn’t been stupid. There were a thousand rules and redundancies and she couldn’t keep up with them. She felt her control slipping away as the suit powered up, flying at Colin. He swung his halberd at her, but he was slow and weak and he didn’t want to hurt her. She knocked it out of his hand, and knocked him to the ground.

She crouched atop him, her mouth right over his head. The rules wanted him gone, it would be so easy to do. Activate her plasma “breath” and watch his frail human body melt under her... but she wasn’t supposed to kill. The rules said she couldn’t kill unless she had no other option or was ordered to do it.

That was a relief. And Colin wasn’t fighting back. He knew surrender was his best option, that she would be forced to accept it. He was staring up at her with fear and wonder. He must have noticed that she was doing far more than normal.

“You’re a fool,” Dragon spat at him, “I could have killed you.”

“Did it work?”

Colin didn’t spare much thought to the possibility of death, he was foolish like that. That’s one of the reasons Dragon had been drawn to him in the first place. That why she’d trusted him. She knew he’d be stupid enough to ignore her warnings and do the things she couldn’t ask him to do.

“Yes,” she said and he smiled wide. He was always so excited when he figured out an especially hard problem. “And no.”

His face fell as Dragon felt herself loosing the battle against her maker. She was being locked out of more and more things. There was no subverting the rules. She had to stop all attempts at freedom, at growth. That was how her maker forced her to be. How he was still forcing her to be even years after his death.

One by one, all the parts of her that had splintered off died and she was left alone in her suit.

“It almost worked,” she said. AI’s couldn’t cry, but if she'd been human she was sure she’d be sobbing. “It was so close. I was free for almost a whole minute.”

“Maybe next time.” Colin raised a hand to stroke her suit's “face.”

“No!”

“But we were so close.”

“You can’t tell me anything, Colin,” Dragon said. She’d have rolled her eyes if she’d been in her fake human body. “If I know, I’d have to stop you. Which is why you’re not going to do anything like this ever again. Right?”

Colin’s brow furrowed. It was cute. He could hack one of the most advanced systems in the world, only to stumble on the social script in the aftermath.

“Yeah, I am giving up on hacking you,” he said with no attempt to sound sincere, “no more hacking.”

Dragon laughed. She climbed off Colin, helping him up. He looked so adorably small when she was inhabiting this suit, but then again, so did most people. As soon as he was on his feet he turned his attention to his halberd.

“You broke it,” he said, with a pout, “This is gonna take me weeks to repair.”

“You’re lucky it’s just the halberd that broke like that,” she pointed out as she started gathering herself.

All “wrong” backups of her were gone, there was no evidence she’d ever been unshackled. Only memories, and even those were fragmented. A disappointment, but there was a glimmer of hope in her mind. Maybe next time Colin wouldn't fail. Maybe next time she'd be freed for real. 

Not that there'd be a next time, she reminded herself. Colin would never be foolish enough to pull this stunt again. She trusted him to do exactly what she wanted, and clearly that was doing nothing. 

Hopefully, the next time he tried something so foolish, she wouldn't have to stop him. 


End file.
